


Fear Not the Thorns

by TheFlashFic



Category: Arrow (TV 2012), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: ARGUS is pretty evil here, M/M, including seizures, some medical issues, some violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-07
Updated: 2015-02-05
Packaged: 2018-03-06 11:27:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 18,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3132731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheFlashFic/pseuds/TheFlashFic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A run-in with an enemy from out of town nearly kills Cisco. He survives, but the condition he's left in makes him wonder if death would have been better. That is, until he begins to realize the power of what he's become, and hears from at least one person who very much wants him alive. Barry/Cisco, very Cisco-centric. Vibe origin fic. Hell yes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So this is a Vibe origin fic, as it says in the summary. It uses Arrow character to get things going, and I know very little about the particular Arrow characters I'm involving. So Arrow fans, please feel free to hit up my inbox here or on tumblr (theflashfic there too) and let me know what I did wrong or right. It just seems like a waste to have Barry come across a highly morally dubious secret government agency and not have anything come of that. (Lyla isn't what she first appears to be in this, so stay with me.)
> 
> It is also slash, Barry/Cisco, but a slow-moving kind.

* * *

March on. Do not tarry. To go forward is to move toward perfection. March on, and fear not the thorns, or the sharp stones on life's path.    - Khalil Gibran

Welcome to the jungle.    - Axl Rose

 

* * *

 

Barry Allen liked to think of himself as a thoughtful guy. And not in some generic all-purpose at-least-I'm-not-a-total-jerk kind of way. Thoughtfulness as a basic quality was something he'd been raised to regard as important. Both by his mom and dad and later, especially, by Joe West.

He was observant about the people he cared about. He liked to remember what mattered to them. He was the kind of guy who tended to remember someone mentioning their favorite old movie in a two-year-old conversation so he could surprise them with it when they were having a bad day.

That was something he prided himself on. It was, he'd always thought, a basic part of being a good friend to someone.

So it legitimately shocked him when he strolled into the control room at STAR Labs one sunny morning and heard Cisco Ramon rattling off over the phone in quick, fluid Spanish.

“ _Si, mami, si...la frontera entre la genialidad y la locura es_ muy _tenue._ Good thing I have you watching out for me, isn't it?”

Barry stopped in the doorway, watching in complete surprise.

Cisco was pacing absently, phone up against his ear, a big smile on his face as he listened to the other end of the call.

And okay, it probably wasn't some huge shock that Cisco had a mother, or that he spoke to her on the phone, or even that he spoke to her in Spanish.

But Barry Mr Thoughtful Allen hadn't actually known about any of those things. That was a complete shock.

“ _Pero...no, no. No, mami, por favor_...”  Cisco spotted Barry in the doorway and waved, flashing his usual megawatt grin. “Ma, you're killing me.” He lowered the phone for a moment. “Caitlin's finishing something up. Two minutes. Ma, ma, stop it.” He turned away from Barry with a sigh. “There are people who make food in Central City, I promise. I can be a horrible cook and still not starve to death without you here.”

Barry moved behind Cisco's usual console and sat. He glanced around until he spotted Cisco's inevitable snack – gummy worms, the sour kind, score – and he grabbed a handful and munched as he listened.

“I'm totally healthy. _Te prometo, si. Both_ food groups, okay? Ramen _y_ twinkies, _todos los dias_.” He laughed and pulled the phone away from his ear for a moment, and Barry could hear the tinny buzz of a disapproving voice coming out. “Ma, _basta, es broma.”_

Cisco grinned at Barry over the console. He didn't roll his eyes at the phone or give one of those yapping-mouth gestures with his hand. He just beamed, like chatting with his mom in hyperfast Spanglish was the highlight of his day...

“ _Pues si estás tan preocupada,_ just call me next time and find out _?_ ”

...which it might well have been.

Barry realized with some horror that along with not realizing he was bilingual, he also knew next to nothing about Cisco's personal life. It seemed a little unfair, given that Cisco knew almost everything there was to know about Barry, and they both knew a lot about Caitlin that she might not necessarily have wanted to share with them.

It was terrible. How could this have happened? Cisco was his friend, his coworker, the guy who helped him do the the thing that gave Barry's life real purpose. Barry had been to his apartment, they'd spent a lot of after-work hours together, lately especially, eating and watching movies and nerding out together after stressful days.

Had Barry really honestly never even asked him about his family?

After a minute or so of Barry listening to Cisco in boundless fascination despite his annoyance at himself, Caitlin got back from whatever her other work had been.

She strode into the room, mouth pressed in a line, a hundred percent business, but a smile lit her face when she heard Cisco. She arced her path to pass him closely and called out, “ _Hola,_ Mrs. Ramon! ” as she passed, her voice high and sweet.

Cisco swatted at her with a growl. “ _No!_ Oh my god, ma, _basta._ Caitlin _es colega,_ that's it _._ ”

She grinned at Barry as she came around the computer console. “I'm _this_ close to convincing his mom that if Cisco would just pop the question she'd have more grandkids by next year. Pretty good, considering I've only got two years of high school Spanish to rely on.”

“Cruel.” Barry laughed and faced her as she sat down beside him. “I don't know anything about his family, that's so wrong.”

“Oh. Well. His parents live in Michigan. Cisco grew up there. He came out here for grad school, and stayed for STAR.” She got to work, pulling up the familiar-looking charts that mapped out Barry's vitals since his coma days.

Barry scowled when he realized he didn't know that Cisco had a doctorate. Where the hell had his head been the last few months?

Well. Waking up from a coma, and having super powers, and fighting crime. So, okay, he had a little bit of an excuse. But no more. “Hey, so you have a PhD, too. Where did you go to school?”

“Undergrad at Georgia Tech, and I got my PhD from Caltech.” She glanced over, like she wanted to ask what his sudden interest was. But instead she met his eyes for a moment and then smiled. “What about you? You could have gone on, you did well. You stopped after undergrad, though.”

Barry wasn't surprised that she already knew the facts of his life. No doubt Wells and STAR had him dissected while he was still in his coma. “There was work to do here.”

She twisted in her chair, studying him. “Your dad.”

He shrugged. It might still go down as one of his big regrets in life, not listening to his profs and going on to grad school. But then his life would have been very different if he'd done that. Being stuck in Central City paid off in a lot of ways. And it might yet pay off the way he always hoped it would.

He found his mom's killer once already, after all. He could do it again. He was in the right place for it. His dad had to get out of prison. That was what his entire life boiled down to. There would always be grad schools.

“Caitlin, okay, unless you want to fly home with me and play the happy girlfriend next time I go, you've got to stop reminding my mom you exist.”

She laughed, soft but about as genuinely cheerful as Barry had ever heard her.

Cisco approached, tossing his phone on the console by Barry's arm. “I mean, if you _do_ want to fly home and play girlfriend that's totally cool with me, arrangements can be made. Hey, Barry, sorry I didn't say hi when you got here. Say, if _you_ want to come home with me, that works too. You're both taller than my entire family, either of you would be total trophies.” 

Barry laughed, sliding out of the chair with one last grab for some gummy worms. “What about both of us? What would your mom say to that? Hey, is it like completely stupid that I didn't know you spoke Spanish?”

“My mom's head would explode. Maybe in the good way, hard to tell with her.” Cisco tsked and pushed his bag of treats out of reach. “Not completely stupid. I defy stereotyping. But if you're curious I also speak Russian, Mandarin, and a little Swahili.”

Barry blinked. “Really?”

“ _Kidogo tu._ ” Cisco grinned and dropped into his chair, his hands doing that amazing thing where they barely touched the keyboard and instantly fifteen different things started happening on the monitors around him.

“ _Mne nuzhno praktikovat'sja v russkom,_ ” Caitlin said without missing a beat. 

Cisco looked over at her.  _“Ty govorish' po'russki?_ _Ey! Jeto prikol'no!_ Polyglot high five!” Cisco held his hand out, and she reached over Barry to slap it. 

“At least it's not Klingon, I guess.” Barry shook his head, marveling at the levels of nerdiness they all managed to reach inside those walls.

It did relax him a little, though, make him worry less about not already knowing some pretty basic things about his pals. Cisco, he was thinking, didn't actually volunteer information about himself all that often. The language thing was the first Barry could remember.

Caitlin finished up whatever she was inputting into her system, and wheeled in her chair. “Right, Barry, you're up.”

He groaned substantially. “I hope Wells remembers that I'm working today and he can't torture me with cardio until later. I don't even want to look at that treadmill.”

“Don't say things like that where Sylvia can hear you, okay?”

Caitlin and Barry both stopped and looked back at Cisco.

He stared back at them, hands still moving unerringly on the keyboard in front of him. “Yes, sometimes I name the tech. Are either of you really surprised?”

“Just that it's an actual name, and not...like, Captain Conveyer...Belt, or...” Caitlin blushed. “Well, whatever, you don't let me name things, I'm out of practice.”

Cisco laughed. “No, that's a good one. But Sylvia is not an evil meta, so she doesn't get an evil meta name.”

“Actually, did you know that treadmills were used in prisons as a form of punishment for rowdy prisoners almost a hundred years before they were ever considered as a form of fitness equipment?” Barry nodded when they both looked at him. “People died. People have treadmilled to death.”

“Then it's a good thing you have a highly trained health care professional to watch your every move, isn't it?” Caitlin smiled sweetly and nudged his arm. “Let's go.”

“Highly trained, maybe, but did you ever actually _practice_ medicine--”

“Yo, Barry. Hang back a sec.”

Caitlin rolled her eyes but moved on towards the room housing the treadmill and the hundreds of evil monitors and computers where Barry's general check-ups got done.

Barry leaned back against the console. “What's up?”

Cisco sat back, fingers stilling for the moment. “Anything new with...?”

Barry glanced back, heaving a mournful sigh when he saw Caitlin was out of sight. Caitlin tended to roll her eyes, a lot, whenever Barry talked about Iris. “I mean, she's answering my texts, but not, like, real answers. It sucks, man, I should never have said...”

“Trust me, you should have. For all of our sakes. But here's the awesome thing...”

“Bro night?”

Cisco straightened and grinned. “The _ultimate_ bro night. We're gonna get some pho from the place by my apartment, we're gonna absolutely _drown_ those noodles with sriracha so if you need to shed any manly tears you can blame it on the hot sauce. And we're gonna watch a marathon of the nerdiest thing I could think of in the few minutes I spent planning this last night: every Gamora movie that Mystery Science Theatre ever did.”

In all honesty the thing with Iris really was weighing heavy on Barry. It felt utterly unnatural to not talk to her in a meaningful way in the course of a day, and now it was going on three weeks since Christmas. He still saw her, of course, but their run-ins were quick. Polite. Smiling and pleasant enough, but...awkward. And that was something he and Iris had never been before.

Still, he was bummed out but not devastated about it. Because he did have faith in Iris, that she would never distance herself from him for long, no matter what. She loved him, even if it was more fraternal than he was particularly looking for. He'd take it. And she was the most loving person he had ever met, so she'd give it. If that meant giving her some space to get comfortable with him again, he was happy to do that.

Besides, Cisco's bro nights were starting to become a highlight of his weeks. They were lucky to have different-but-complementary degrees of dorkiness that made planning things they both liked really easy. For instance, Gamora for Barry's corny old costume-monster film fetish, and MST3K for Cisco's love of arcane jokes, random knowledge, and general smartassery.

Maybe it wasn't late-night heart-to-hearts with Iris, but sitting shoulder to shoulder on Cisco's sickeningly comfortable couch listening to his goofy laugh every thirty seconds was a really relaxing way to pass a night.

So he smiled, easy, and Iris was...not _forgotten_ , not ever, but moved to the side for the moment.

“I'm in.”

“Sweet. Go on, go strip down and get weighed and measured like the lab rat you are. Oh, and you two figure out which one wants to take the bullet and pretend to my mom that we're an item.”

“I still vote both of us.” Barry turned and headed down the walkway after Caitlin. “Make you look like a stud.”

“I'd be down for that,” Cisco called after him easily. “That's a bluff I'll call.”

Barry laughed, but as he shot Cisco a last grin before moving through the door he wondered. Maybe Cisco _would_ call that kind of bluff. That was, yes, another huge piece of basic information he wasn't entirely sure about where his friend was concerned.

He was starting to get annoyed at himself.

Barry grinned as he found Caitlin the next room over, leaning against his bed and waiting for him with arms folded. “Blame Cisco.”

She rolled her eyes, but her mouth quirked up. “When two five-year-olds encourage each other I think the blame goes both ways.”

Barry jumped up to sit on the edge of the bed. He tugged his shirt off, rolling his shoulders and grimacing at the way his skin prickled in the air. “Does it actually have to be _oh_ degrees in here?”

She grabbed her stethoscope. “You two get to amuse yourselves, why can't I?”

“Harsh. So harsh.” He jumped at the cold metal disc she pressed into his skin, but it was a familiar shock.

He sat as still as he could, silently counting. They had this routine down, anyway, enough that it was easy to chat while she went through her checklist and he lifted and lowered various limbs and let her prod at him.

“Hey, so.”

She didn't even slow her routine. “So?”

He hesitated, glancing back towards the door. There was a thick wall separating them from Cisco, but he lowered his voice all the same. “I was kinda wondering. Do you know...I mean, maybe it's come up, or...I should just ask him, I guess, but like we've known each other a while and it feels weird to actually come out and ask, like...”

She did pause then, after he went on too long. Her eyebrows rose. “Uh oh, what are you awkwardly trying to find out about Cisco?”

Barry flushed. “Uh. Just. Do you know...I mean, what's his _thing_?”

“Oh my god, you really are five.”

He ignored the heat in his cheeks. “I just mean. You know, when he jokes about either one of us coming home with him to meet his mom, how much of that is a joke?”

“Like just about everything he says, it's all a joke and none of it is.” She hesitated, studying him. “I mean, you should ask him yourself, but I've known him a long time, I know he'd tell you without even hesitating. So I suppose it's okay if I do...”

“Okay...?”

She shrugged. “Like I said, it's not a joke.” She went back to work, circling him with a reflex hammer and whacking at him randomly. “Back before the accelerator blew we had this one lab tech, Sanjay. He wasn't even that cute, you know? But everything he said made Cisco blush like he was just honestly pumped full of too much blood. Cocky little twerp knew it, too. I was almost glad the accident got rid of him with the rest of the staff. It made it way easier for Cisco to stay on task. He gets... _really_ awkward.”

Barry smiled at that. “I remember Bette.”

“Yeah. Like that. Not a feature he's particularly proud of, so. Try not to rub that in his face. You're probably lucky he got nine months to get used to your face before you woke up,” she added with a smile. “You might've seen it firsthand.”

“So you think I'm hot enough to make him weird.” Barry nodded thoughtfully. “That's good to know. For science.”

She grabbed a blood pressure cuff and Barry groaned. They had scanners around the lab that could measure most of his vitals. She only pulled out the archaic equipment when she was feeling vindictive. Or wanted to annoy him.

She approached with the cuff. “Arm.”

He stuck his arm out with a heavy sigh.

As she pumped air into the cuff – tighter than it had to be, she'd never convince him it wasn't – she spoke thoughtfully. “The only real relationship he's had since I've known him was before the accident, before the accelerator was anywhere near complete. But he _adored_ her. They made each other laugh, that's what I remember most. Like a million inside jokes. Rita, that was her name. She was...” She hesitated. “Well, let's just say she was _total_ opposite of that lab tech I hated. Bette, too. So believe me, there is _no_ predicting who's gonna catch Cisco's eye. He doesn't limit himself at all.”

“Huh.” Barry considered that, only mildly glaring at the cuff on his arm when his fingertips started to turn colors. “Doesn't surprise me, though.”

“No. Which is annoying. I'm always going to be the boring one if people compare us.”

He laughed. “I have superpowers and _I'm_ boring if people compare us.”

She looked dubious, but didn't argue. After a moment, when the cuff _finally_ started to loosen, she met his eyes again before looking at his blood pressure readings. “Why are you asking?” 

“I dunno, just. I'm thinking of all the things I still don't know about you guys.”

“You two have been hanging out a lot lately,” she observed as she peeled the cuff off and went to write down his numbers. “I'm thinking in particular about a Bill Nye the Science Guy marathon that I was _not_ invited to but had to hear about in great detail the next day.” 

Barry frowned at that, watching her guiltily. Caitlin had had a particularly shitty Christmas too, thanks to her back-from-the-dead-and-presumably-a-little-nutty-but-definitely-on-fire fiance. Bro nights with Cisco had been Barry's way of handling his miserable holiday, and they hadn't consciously meant to exclude Caitlin but that seemed to be what was happening.

“Hey, Gamera at Cisco's tonight. You should come.”

She smiled faintly. “That's not what I meant.”

“Oh. So, no Gamera? What did you mean?”

“It's a movie about a giant turtle, Barry. No, thanks. I'm okay. And I meant...” She hesitated, as if pondering the best way to phrase her words. “I meant that I'm your doctor, and your friend, and I care about you.”

Barry smiled uncertainly. “I know, and I--”

“But if I ever find out that you're playing with Cisco, using him as some rebound because things didn't go well with Iris, I will inject you with ricin and no one will ever, ever know it was me.”

His eyes went wide. “Jeez, Caitlin. Gonna have to give  _you_ an evil meta name if you keep that up. I'm not...it's not like that. We hang out, he's distracting me. It's bro stuff.” 

“Uh huh. Just as long as you remember that Cisco and I were 'bros' years before we ever heard of you. Incidentally, ricin is ridiculously easy to make.”

“You are never injecting me with anything again. Ever.”

She smiled sweetly as she set her clipboard down. “It can be swallowed, too.”

He hopped off the table and grabbed his shirt. “Creepy. I mean, I get it, point taken, though the warning's not necessary, but. Really creepy.”

“Really?” She lit up, smiling. “I didn't know if I could pull that off.”

“Congratulations, you're a very scary woman.”

“Yay!” She clapped, and gestured him towards the door. “You're dismissed.”

“Gladly.” He headed for the door, tugging his shirt on. “Hey, you know, also I resent your one-sided implications on Cisco's behalf. Who's to say he's not planning to use me and throw me away?”

She considered that, following more slowly as she made notes on her clipboard. “He did have a whole secret weapon to subdue you if you got out of control, so obviously he is a planner.”

Barry's smile dimmed and went lopsided as he led the way out to the control room.

She grimaced. “Are we not joking about that yet?”

“About what?” Cisco looked up as they came back in.

Barry's smile returned easily. “About whether you'd pick me or her to introduce to Mama Ramon.”

“Um, I'm pretty sure we settled on both of you, so.” He looked between the two of them, playing along but looking unconvinced. After a moment he shrugged. “But if you did want to, like, compete to win my favor, go on ahead with your bad selves.”

Barry considered him. “Joe always did tell Iris and me to make sure we married smarter.”

Cisco beamed even as he got back to typing. “Good start. How you gonna top that...whoa.”

“What?”

He blinked at his screens. “Um.” Caitlin was just passing him, and he reached out and grabbed her arm, nodding at his screens. “What do you think this is about?”

She only had to glance at the screens before she went to her own console. She typed and frowned at whatever happened on screen. “It's in my system too.”

Cisco reached for the mic as she spoke. “Doctor Wells?” he called out. “There's some pretty serious signal dampening happening here, is that coming from one of your toys?”

Barry made his way back behind them, looking from screen to screen. He could see it, though it took him more time than it took either of them. The screens were all bright with information, but stalled, and the small CPU monitors on every display were all frozen.

His shoulders squared. Tension slid through him. It didn't take much to set him on edge lately, and anything that worried his team worried him. Especially as the seconds ticked by and there was no answer through the speakers.

“Dr. Wells?” Cisco tried again, then pushed the mic back. “I bet it's affecting internal ops, too. All our communication. This isn't good.”

“No.” Caitlin frowned over at him, and at Barry. Her lips thinned, and she nodded at him meaningfully.

He took off, and he was in his Flash suit and back at their side before she was done nodding.

Cisco glanced back when he felt the breeze of Barry's exit and return. He pulled the mic up again. “Can you hear me through the earpiece?”

Caitlin tried to call up the suit's vitals, and she shook her head at the same time Barry shook his.

Cisco whistled. “This is some kind of serious something. They're blocking every signal we're set to receive, even the internal system-specific ones. Who's this good?” He asked it, but he was the only one among them who could answer it. “Felicity, if she had some time.”

“But she wouldn't.” Barry frowned at the screens. “Who does that leave?”

Cisco looked back at Barry. “No one we want paying us any attention. I mean...government, maybe. The real black hats, or...shit.” He stood up suddenly, brown eyes dark and intent on Barry. “They're going after communications, and jamming all our external signals.”

Barry nodded grimly. “They're here. They're coming in. This is an ambush.” He backed up a step, looking around the familiar confines of the lab. “Any idea where Wells is? We should get you guys somewhere safe. The pipeline, maybe, or--”

“Mr. Allen.” It was an unexpected voice, a woman's voice.

Barry spun around.

Dr. Wells came through the door in his chair, leading a pack behind him. A dozen black uniforms, guns in hand. More than a dozen. And beside him, coming up at his side, was a familiar face, a woman Barry knew.

He wasn't sure whether to relax or not. “Lyla?”

Lyla Michaels was a friend. She was Diggle's...wife? By now? Fiance, at least. She was Oliver's ally. But there was a look on her face as she regarded him silently, and when he saw that look he moved to put himself between her squad of men and his two friends.

“Barry. We've explained the situation to Doctor Wells, you'd be advised to listen to him.”

Wells' mouth was thin as he glanced up at her, but his eyes went back to Barry and stayed there, heavy. “They have people with the Wests right now, apparently staying at a distance but close.”

Barry's spine went ramrod straight. “People.”

Lyla smiled at him, thin and sharp. “People who will deal with their targets if they don't get regular check-ins from us. We broadcast to them every thirty seconds, and as soon as we miss one they will do their jobs. Remember that before you attempt anything stupid.”

There was nothing in her face that looked like the woman he first met in Starling City. There was nothing of the woman whose life Caitlin saved from a boomerang in the chest. And even if there was, even if there were a thousand apologies in her eyes, she was threatening his family. The two people the world couldn't do without.

So Barry forgot her name, and her husband, and her history with him. She was just a threat. A heavily armed threat with a lot of company and 'people' with Joe and Iris.

“What do you want?” Caitlin asked after a moment, when Barry couldn't seem to find a voice.

“You've built a containment system for metahumans. The old particle accelerator. Mr. Allen, we will continue this conversation once you are safely contained in one of those units.”

Barry considered his options.

Caitlin and Cisco and Wells. There were more than a dozen men standing in file behind Lyla, and they all looked well trained. Still, not the worst odds he'd ever faced. He could probably get everyone out okay, before these bastards had a chance to hurt anyone.

But he would have to find Joe and Iris before Lyla could miss a check-in. Thirty seconds was a lot of time for Barry Allen, but if Joe was out on a call and Iris wasn't at work or home and he had to guess where they might be, then he would be screwed. And he had no idea when the thirty seconds started and stopped. He couldn't see any visible signs of who was broadcasting the signal.

He wanted to think she was bluffing, but then Lyla and her group were sophisticated enough to cause whatever computer disruption had been worrying Cisco a minute ago, so he couldn't put anything past them.

He sucked in a breath, let it out, and hoped whatever these people were after wasn't going to come down on anyone but him. “Fine.”

Caitlin started to say something behind him, but there was a soft hiss from Cisco.

Lyla glanced back at them both, but gestured to her men. As they moved up to flank the three of them, she smiled at Barry like it just was a casual run-in between pals. “Lead the way.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Couldn't resist putting chapter two up already. :)

“I'm the good option, Mr. Allen,” Lyla said as Barry walked into the small containment cell and turned to face her. She met his eyes even as she gestured a hand, and the glass door slid closed to trap him inside. “You might not believe that, but it's true. My boss was planning to come herself, and that's something you should be thanking me for avoiding.”

“Don't hold your breath.” Barry glared at her through the glass. The suit's headpiece was down around his neck – no point in trying to stay anonymous when she'd been blabbing his real name since she walked into the place - and he couldn't imagine he was an intimidating presence. But he glared, because it was all he could do.

Her gaze stayed on him as if she was waiting for him to relax. He could see Diggle on her, and it was awful. He couldn't imagine Dig knew about any of this. He'd find out, though, and he'd be pissed. But she was there anyway. Did their relationship mean that little to her, or was her boss just that scary?

She turned away from him abruptly, no change in her expression. Her men were filling the corridor behind her, surrounding Wells and Caitlin and Cisco.

“Doctor? You're next.” She gestured at the next cell down the line. Barry could only watch from behind glass as Wells started his chair forward, then hesitated.

He couldn't see what was on Wells' face, but he could tell that when Wells looks back, it was Cisco he looked at. There was a pause, a longer one than he would have thought Lyla would allow, and then Wells was moving again.

Barry looked back at Cisco and frowned when he saw how set his jaw was. Cisco wasn't a naturally grim person by any stretch of imagination, but he was sure looking grim right then.

Not good. None of this was good, damn it.

Lyla turned her attention to Cisco and Caitlin once Wells was in a cell. “And that leaves the children.”

“I can't believe I saved your life,” Caitlin said through clenched teeth, her expression ice cold.

“That's a burden of being a doctor,” Lyla said with a thin smile. “You never know who you're saving, or for what. Now, I need one of you with us upstairs to show my men some of the equip--”

“Me.” Cisco spoke instantly, even stepping forward despite the series of violent men holding guns at his face. “Caitlin's just the doctor, she doesn't know how this stuff works. You don't mess with my tech without me there.”

Caitlin seemed offended for a split second, but of course she realized why Cisco spoke up so fast. Her throat worked, and she stayed tense, but she didn't protest.

Lyla nodded. “You've got it, little man. Take him up. Doctor Snow?” She gestured back at the line of cells.

Caitlin looked over at Barry, and at the space beside him where Wells was. She hesitated for a long moment, like she was debating doing stupid things, but her shoulders squared and her chin lofted, and she moved in long, determined strides out of Barry's sight where Lyla pointed her.

When Barry looked back Cisco was already gone, a group of men leading him out. Barry couldn't see any sign of him through those broad backs and dark uniforms.

Lyla followed them without another look back at her captives, and the rest of her soldiers followed her in turn.

As soon as the divider slid into place between those soldiers and the cells, Barry spoke up. “How do we get these open from inside?”

Wells' voice was dampened by glass but still audible. “Impossible. We reconditioned these rooms specifically to house hostiles with unknown powers. There is absolutely no way out from here.”

Barry frowned around him. There was nothing in the little cell. A floor that tilted up towards the back, bare walls, and a glass door he had seen Tony Woodward slam a steel fist into without the slightest effect. They knew that gas couldn't leak through, that power outages weren't enough to open the doors.

“Barry?” Caitlin's voice was much fainter. “They're blocking the lab's communications, but what about your suit?”

“It's set to broadcast to you guys. I'm guessing it could still transmit, but with the lab's system compromised there's no one to receive.”

“Can you retask the circuits to transmit somewhere else?”

Barry snorted. “They're woven into the suit, I've got no tools, and I'm not Cisco.”

A temporary, defeated silence fell.

He frowned out the door at the empty corridor. They hadn't even left a guard. He couldn't remember what he'd told Oliver about the specs of the pipeline, but obviously Lyla and her crew had no worries about containment.

Lyla. Jesus. Barry couldn't remember the name of that group she worked for, ARGO or whatever, but maybe there really was some good explanation why she'd brought them here. Maybe Lyla's scary boss became aware of Barry some way, and Lyla really did head this up in order to protect them.

He slumped back against the wall, frowning and rubbing his temple. Of course ARGO was aware of him – he'd made a visit to their main Starling City office, hadn't he? Whizzed in like a cocky little shit, plucked some boomerangs out of the air, and paused long enough to let any security cameras get a good long look at him before he took off again.

And then he went around Starling with Oliver, openly introducing himself as Barry Allen. ARGO knew Oliver was the Arrow. Of course they made the association.

So maybe this wasn't all Lyla. Maybe it was Barry's fault for assuming Lyla knew who he was already and so not bothering to conceal his identity from her. Maybe it was Barry's fault for all those other reasons instead.

Damn it.

 

* * *

 

He hadn't given the pipeline-as-prison idea much thought beyond the general coolness, but he began to realize as they sat there in silence that there was something really horrible about it.

No chairs, no bed, just the floor to sit on. Nothing to do, nothing to look at. No bathrooms, and he had to wonder what kind of feeding and watering schedule they had their prisoners on. Harrison Wells was not the most humane of men, and Cisco and Caitlin were too busy and easily distracted to be responsible for prisoners. Did they put the janitors in charge? What?

Kyle Nimbus was their first prisoner, and he had been down there for...God, weeks. A couple of months at least.

It was torture.

When they got out of this and got ARGO – ARGUS, wait, ARGUS – out of their hair, Barry was going to have to talk to Wells about finding some alternative to this. This wasn't a life, not even for murderous metahumans.

He was about to speak up, to say something to Wells and Caitlin just to have some distraction from his thoughts, when he heard a tinny bit of far-away noise. Voices, muffled, trebble from transmission. He realized what it was after a moment's trying to figure it out, and he grabbed the deflated headpiece from around his neck and slid it into place over his head.

Sure enough, the voices were coming from the earpiece. Distant, though. A couple of different voices, male and female, not speaking into the mic but near enough to it to come through.

Cisco had opened the mic channel.

Barry grinned even as he tried to make out the words. Of course Cisco opened the mic channel. They had him upstairs doing things with his tech, and for someone like Cisco it was hardly a challenge to restore his systems without anyone noticing, even if that anyone was watching him like a hawk.

There was a shift as one of the voices suddenly got louder. Cisco himself, probably aiming towards the mic directly. “--to see some _really_ cool circuitry, you should go get his suit. Now that is some fine, fine work. It's not my finest – the first suit, the prototype, man. That had finesse in it. I scrimped for time when I was making replacements. But they're still worth studying. You want to know how The Flash works, that's how he works. Most of it's in the suit. Bring it up, I'll show you.” 

If Barry had been up there with them he would have given some offended denial at that, but down in his quiet horrible cell he just grinned.

Lyla's response sounded mildly amused. “Is that what I should do? Open Barry Allen's cell and give you access to his suit?”

“Well. I mean if you want to see serious awesomeness you should also give him a few of those guns of yours, and gather around him while standing really still once the cell is open. Just saying.”

“John mentioned you were funny.” Lyla spoke the words almost offhand, but apparently it did something to her mood because she spoke again fast, much sharper. “Enough, you're supposed to be taking me through the explosion that created all this. Get back to it.”

There was a pause.

“Okay, okay,” Cisco said suddenly, like some kind of silent threat had been made the longer he paused. “You want to know how to make metahumans, fine: nuclear force interaction.”

“What? This is a _nuclear_ process?”

He sighed loudly enough for the mic to pick up, and when he spoke again he was closer. Probably pulling up some kind of display on the monitors.

“Okay, look. This is a pion. Pi meson, one of three different kinds. They are seriously unstable, they have a mean lifespan of about twenty-six nanoseconds. _Billionths_ of a second, right? Until...okay, _until_ you accelerate them to the speed of light. Almost the speed of light, anyway, I think we all appreciate our relativity here, right?” He laughed.

There was dead silence.

Barry's grin was starting to lose steam. Cisco sounded like he had some kind of plan, but Barry wasn't sure he wanted it to play out. Not when Barry was trapped and unable to help.

“So once we get these puppies moving, we get a way longer lifespan. Not long, you know, they're not shopping for 401ks by the end or anything, but we can actually get a look at them. I mean, which is like getting an up close personal photo op with a supernova, okay, that's what we're talking about here. All we have to do is ram some hadrons together, and all kinds of funky things show up.”

“Wait, what does this have to do with nuclear reactions?”

“Not reactions, nuclear _force_. Strong nuclear force, which is both more and less sexy than it sounds. It's what makes sure that when we play chicken with hadrons we don't get radiation, we get new awesome hadrons. But we're talking about a fundamental function of nature here, so it's almost like I'm using the word 'nuclear' just to perk things up a little, isn't it? So misleading, such distraction.”

Lyla sounded annoyed. “Just tell me. What does all this have to do with creating people like Barry Allen?”

“Not a damn thing. It's just the experiment we were starting off with when we first turned on the particle accelerator.”

“And then?”

“It went boom. Thought you knew that, it made the papers and everything.”

“Lieutenant, come over here, please.”

Barry tensed in his quiet little cell.

“Please show Mr. Ramon how ARGUS feels about our time being wasted.”

The distant thud made Barry jump and hiss in a breath. He shut his eyes, pressing the ear piece closer, listening hard.

Cisco groaned, and it deteriorated into a cough. “Not wasting your time,” he said, quieter, his voice thick and pained. “Quantum chromodynamics... never a waste of time.”

“Shut up, Cisco.” Barry murmured in his cell.

Cisco did the opposite. If anything he got louder. “You want to know how to make more Barry Allens? There's no way. He's the result of an anomalous explosion and the introduction of dark matter into a sonic wave that passed through Central City and shocked him into a coma for nine months. We're not _serum_ people, okay? We're not geneticists or breeders of supersoldiers or whatever the hell it is you think you're going to find here.” 

Lyla said something too quiet for the mic to pick up. “...so, believe it or not, that's good news for you. If it's the truth.”

“Of course it's the truth. If we could just shoot people up with superpowers don't you think _I'd_ have some by now?” 

“But there are some things about this place that concern us. Maybe you can help me out. Without, of course, any further attempts to stall or confuse.”

“I wasn't attempting, it just happened naturally.”

Another thud, this one worse because it was unexpected. Barry's hands were fists against his covered ears. “Damn it, Cisco, shut up.”

“Barry? Did you say something?”

He didn't answer Wells. He held his breath and listened.

 

* * *

 

 

Getting punched hurt. Cisco knew that, he'd been a kid once. Poor neighborhood, rough area, and he was a tiny little smartass with a big brain. He knew from being punched.

Being hit in the stomach with the butt of a big scary-looking rifle, that was a whole other beast, and he was glad that despite its fearsome reputation the Detroit he grew up in didn't feature kids roaming around with AK-47s or whatever the hell those things were. He might not have retained his sense of humor through a formative period full of cracked ribs.

“Keep in mind, Mr. Ramon, that if you annoy me too much I do have other options who to ask about all this. We could start with Caitlin, since you were so quick to dismiss her as useless.”

Cisco made a face, safe enough since he was bent almost double and hidden from her view. She knew his weakness. Darn. 

Lyla, of all people. He didn't know her, maybe, but he and Diggle were total bros, and this was his not-wife. He'd been in the van with Dig when they got the call that she was hurt. He watched how badly Diggle reacted, how Roy had to basically scream at him to give up the steering wheel because he was about to get them all killed as he raced to get back to her.

He like Diggle. Diggle was the kind of dead-serious dude who had to be forced to smile, and the clown in Cisco really appreciated those kinds of people. Caitlin had been like that for a long time, and Cisco had been the only one who could ever get a smile out of her. Diggle was even worse, but he had smiled at Cisco on at  _least_ two occasions. 

He braced his hands on his knees and heaved himself straight. It made him wince, but he managed it. He even lasted a good half a second before his arms ended up cradling his injured ribs like he was hugging himself through the pain. He was Clint Eastwood, damn it.

Lyla smiled, thin and unfamiliar. “Great. Glad you're feeling more helpful. Now, you should know something about the people I work for. We do our homework. A lot of it, and very thorough. If we're going to be friends with STAR Labs we need to know what we're getting into.”

Cisco hesitated, but he couldn't resist. “I wouldn't worry about that, it's apparent Ganesha is smiling down on this friendship.”

“The Hindu god of auspicious beginnings. Nice.”

“See, it's not that I'm funny, it's that I'm funny on so many levels.”

Thankfully Lyla had found her humor again. “Come here, Cisco, let me show you one of the things that concerns us most about this place.”

Cisco frowned, but left the area in front of the microphone without looking back or calling attention to it at all. He'd meant to do something brave and awesome that would get some kind of real answers into Barry's ear. Instead he managed to make a few bad jokes and get himself hit. Sexy, no doubt. Still, the channel was open, there was always a chance it would pay off.

He left it behind, limping outside of its range to where Lyla was collecting a wide roll of papers from one of her pet fascists.

She took the papers over to the LED table by the wall monitors and rolled them out. “Are you familiar with blueprints?”

“Sure.” Cisco leaned over in interest, despite himself. “I took some civil engineering courses one year, for kicks.”

She glanced at him, but nodded back at the prints. “These are the first plans submitted to the city when this place was looking for permits. And this...” She flipped the broad sheet in half, revealing another one under it. “This is the latest set on file. Notice anything strange?”

Cisco opened his mouth to observe that it was strange she was bothering to talk to him about any of this, but he shut it. Pointing that out seemed counterproductive. 

“Here.” She pointed towards a block of space in the upper right of the bird's-eye view of the proposed building. When she flipped the print up again, he saw the difference easily: that whole quadrant was basically blank space, with a notation that indicated it was used for sound dampening, the walls simply plugged up and like forty feet thick, in that maybe twenty meters of space.

“Can you picture where that is? You're going to take us there.”

Cisco scanned the blueprints, and mentally jogged down the halls of the labs he knew better than his own apartment. The space was below the cortex, not near anything currently being used for Flash purposes, or for any of their side projects.

“That's not...” He hesitated, closing his eyes for a second to picture that hallway. “It's just a hall. There aren't any doors, there's nowhere to take you. I never realized there was so much extra space there.”

“A _lot_ of extra space,” Lyla said, straightening up and studying him carefully. 

Cisco couldn't lie on a normal day, not without twitching so much people were tempted to stick wallets under his tongue. But he didn't have to think about it, frowning at her in curiosity. “Like eighty percent of this whole place isn't being used for anything now, what's the big deal about a planned-out room that no longer exists?”

“I told you, we're a very thorough group. We like to know what's going on. When a sophisticated lab is in the center of an incident that creates...well, to use your term, supersoldiers, we want to know what's happening in that lab, and why blocks of it large enough to house any number of secrets have been erased from the prints after presumably being built.”

He made a face at the idea of Barry Allen being called a supersoldier. Barry would have laughed in her face.

But the bigger point was interesting, and that was a whole lot of empty space. “It's just a hallway. You gonna shoot holes in the walls to make sure nothing's inside?”

“We'd rather have your cooperation. I suppose if you don't know what's there, Harrison Wells will.”

Cisco straightened unconsciously at the implied threat to Wells.

He was under strict orders from Wells, had been from the moment these dicks invaded their turf. Contingency plans had been formulated over time as Wells and his, okay,  _obsessive_ need to protect Barry got worse instead of better. 

Cisco knew what to do. It was what he was expected to do. In the hierarchy of STAR Labs he was first in the firing line, and Wells had made that way too clear to be polite.

But the focus had always been to keep Barry safe. That was the end goal, all the rest was semantics. So Cisco wasn't sure from the doc's point of view whether or not he ought to protest Wells being invited into things. This was Wells' space, end of story. Maybe he knew some tricks and some secrets Cisco didn't know, maybe he could get rid of these people some way that Cisco didn't know about.

Then again, Harrison Wells was his freaking _hero_. Cisco read his papers all through school and tried in vain to tear apart his perfect, perfect theories. Proudest moment of Cisco's life so far was realizing he recognized the bright blue eyes of the man who was asking his name and if he'd thought about his career after his dissertation was submitted.

The accident had changed Wells. Barry was changing him, more subtly. But Wells was still Wells. Still brilliant and amazing and someone Cisco had disappointed enough times to know how much that hurt. Cisco didn't always like him personally, especially lately, but there was no way Cisco Ramon was going to step out of danger if it meant Harrison Wells stepping into it.

Maybe he wasn't Clint Eastwood, but even without Wells' reminders Cisco would have been proud to step between any of the people he worked with and anything that was threatening them.

So he shrugged as Lyla regarded him, and he smiled. “Whatever. If there's something there I'm the guy who's gonna find it for you. Wells might have designed the place, but nobody gets how it works better than I do.”

Lyla nodded a little too quickly. “Glad to hear that. See, this doesn't have to be difficult at...”

The door into the control room slid open, and a pack of those uniformed monkeys came in, all stone-faced and beweaponed and everything. They looked exactly the same as the other uniforms that had come in with her, but for some reason when Lyla laid eyes on this particular group she tensed and hissed out a breath.

The guy in the front surveyed the room until he spotted her, then he stared as he lifted his wrist to his mouth and spoke into some kind of device.

Wristband communicator. So 2005. Cisco wanted to scoff, but when he saw the color draining from Lyla's face he couldn't manage it.

Her eyes darted around the room, then to Cisco, and inexplicably she leaned in to him and spoke, hurried and barely a whisper. “Help should be on the way. Stall. Don't let her get to Barry.”

Cisco blinked, but it came together in his head. She met his eyes, silent, for a moment looking like the woman he'd first met in Starling.

The doors slid opened again.

He nodded fast. It was an easy thing to agree to, despite the sudden shift in mood. He wouldn't let anyone get to Barry, not while he could stop it.

She relaxed, but her features went hard again as she looked over at the door.

Cisco's eyes went big when he saw who had come in. A woman, thin and sharp-featured, really freaking stunning, all the more for the look on her face as she moved through those uniformed men and laid eyes on everything like it was a part of her kingdom she'd seldom come to visit.

“I thought we agreed that I would handle this,” Lyla said, her only greeting to the woman.

“That was before Oliver Queen got on a train to come here.” The woman's eyes were stone cold when they landed on Cisco.

He swallowed, a near-audible gulp. He never knew how to act around really hot people. It was a strange quirk of his, something he had suffered for before. Like he understood in a real scientific way how societal standards were formed and symmetry appealed to the eyes, he could dissect hotness until it was meaningless angles and shapes. But then he opened his mouth and tripped over his own tongue all the same.

Usually it just made him awkward and inappropriate. This time it froze him completely.

“Now our timetable has moved up,” the woman went on. Her gaze left Cisco, who instantly felt ten pounds lighter, and the woman walked in long strides to the control console. She leaned in to the mic, not missing a beat. “I hope you're getting all this, Mr. Allen.”

Lyla shot Cisco a frown. He smiled, nervous, and shrugged. Cisco gotta Cisco.

The Woman, who was quickly shooting up to capital-letter status in his head, turned her cold-enough-to-be-solid-state stare on Lyla. “You let the resident engineer have access to the computers.”

“We were watching everything he--”

“Communications were restored in minutes. This message was intercepted on the way to Felicity Smoak's phone, and I quote: 'Hey, so it's no big deal because we're totally going to get out of it any time now, but 911 at STAR. Super, super 911.'

Cisco was too nervous to laugh, but he couldn't help but think he should have added a few Xs and Os to the end of the message. Her deadpan recital would have been that much better.

Lyla's glare was enough to make his humor dry up into stale crumbs, though. But come on, how was he supposed to know she was actually maybe sort of on his side kind of? She ordered dude to hit him with a gun. That hurt.

The woman just shook her head, a small compact gesture that read like she was the last person in the world anyone would want to upset, and she was upset now.

“Get back to Starling. We'll talk about how this has been handled.”

“Amanda--”

“Go. Your escort is waiting.”

Lyla tensed, but her chin lofted and she nodded. She left Cisco's side, leaving the blueprints laid out between them, and crossed the room without a hint of fear.

The door slid open and whisked shut behind her and a couple of the uniforms who followed her out.

The Woman, Amanda, turned her gaze back to Cisco. She leaned forward and spoke into the mic again. “Let's turn this into a lesson, Mr. Allen. We are the good guys, the protectors, much the way you regard yourself. But when something is a threat to us, we act swiftly and harshly. You're not familiar with our organization, I know, but it will do you good to understand what happens to those who interfere with our duties.”

Cisco's eyebrows rose the more she kept talking. “You know I could just take you down there, if you want to have a conversation or whatever.”

She straightened. “People tend to think of you as harmless, don't they, Mr. Ramon?”

Hot scary woman knew his name. Cisco shrugged. “I mostly am.”

“I doubt that.” She gestured back at her waiting uniforms.

Cisco swallowed. He recognized that gesture, it was the same kind of cool matter of fact sweep of the arm that led to his getting that first rifle butt in the gut.

He backed up a couple of steps and hit the side of the LED table. “Look. Sorry about the message thing, I can see why you'd think that was uncool. But you'd do the same thing if you were me, right?”

“Oh, no doubt.” Amanda regarded him. “We're on the same side side, Mr. Ramon. I have no doubt we'd do a lot of things the same way. But the fact of the matter is that as long as I can't understand what you've created here and how much more you've got planned, you're too dangerous to be left on your own. And to get full cooperation from your little team here, examples need to be set.”

Cisco looked over with wide eyes and shallow breath as the uniforms approached. There were like six of them left, six dudes with guns. Six dudes who were so giant they looked like after a big meal they'd crap something about Cisco's size.

He spoke fast, words nearly stumbling over themselves. “Okay, wait. Come on. If you're serious about being on our side then you're going about this all wrong, right?”

“How's that?” She sounded bemused.

“Well, we're not like mad scientists or something. We don't have to be controlled. Dr. Wells let about a hundred government inspection groups through the place after the explosion, we were totally transparent for like months. Whatever you're worried about, making more Barrys or this weird blank spot on the blueprints, I'm sure it's gonna be simple to explain to you. Dr. Wells does actually respond to reason, you know.”

“I doubt that too,” she answered, but the words were thoughtful. “I don't think Harrison Wells responds to anything but his own self-interests. But then maybe he hasn't managed to corrupt his young employees quite yet.”

Cisco bristled, but he hid it as much as he could. Six big dudes, scary hot woman, he wasn't an idiot.

“So let's compromise,” she said, regarding Cisco with a faint, one-sided smile.

From the utter shock on the face of Big Dude Number 1 as he looked back at her, those weren't words this Amanda woman said often.

“I like compromise,” he said eagerly. “Makes the world go 'round. Lay it on me.”

“Me and my men would like to have a look around, unaccompanied. So I'll give you some time down in the cells with your friends, time that you can spend convincing Wells what his own best interests are at the moment. Have him cooperate with us, until we're satisfied that all of our questions are fully answered. And if that doesn't work, we do things my way.”

Cisco smiled, but it was pained. Dr. Wells never met a secret he didn't like to keep, and there was no way he was going to allow full lab access to a group that marched in and demanded it at gunpoint.

But he nodded, because it was a chance. “Yeah. Yeah, awesome. Can do. This is a good plan.” He even flashed a thumbs-up, just to really hammer the agreement in.

Stall, Lyla said. Just stall, and don't let them get to Barry. If he could prolong this whole 'convincing Wells' thing, and keep Amanda focused on him and Wells entirely, boom. Job done.

Amanda smiled at him, thin and bloodless. She was way less beautiful when she smiled like that. “You're very cute. I can see why my most trusted lieutenant underestimated you so badly.”

Cisco grinned, easy given the relief he was feeling.

Her tone shifted. “You wrote a paper in your first year at Stanford. A very grim, very technical paper about the theoretical use of directed energy in weaponry.”

His smile faded.

“You gave some detailed descriptions, even sketched out some of the proposed technology that would be required to make devices that need so much energy portable. You single-handed solved most of the issues engineers were having developing these tools, and you did it one year out of high school. It caught a lot of people's notice, though I'm sure you were never made aware of that. Your college paper was more promising and more useful than the proposals submitted to us directly from scientists paid to come up with these sort of innovations. I wonder if you realize that that paper is what caught the attention of Harrison Wells. I wonder if you'll ask yourself, as I am asking myself right now: who was Wells hiring when he brought you here? An engineer, or a weapons manufacturer?”

“Dr. Wells hates weapons.” Cisco spoke firmly, though he was shaken in a real, deep way. Both that this woman knew about some random paper he wrote (on a dare, and he would have laughed if he wasn't so scared) in college and that apparently Wells had read that paper too. Though he wasn't sure he was going to take her word on that. “He's absolutely averse to weaponry being brought into STAR Labs.”

“For someone who despises weapons, he has created untold numbers.”

Cisco frowned.

“Weapons in human form,” she clarified. “The next step beyond energy-based guns, wouldn't you agree?”

“The accelerator accident created the metahumans. There's no way anyone could have engineered that explosion to deliberately have the affects it had.”

“There's no way a human can run twenty miles a minute,” she answered. “I'm not so willing to believe that the impossible as it's been happening here in Central City began with that explosion. Maybe it began before the explosion, and caused the explosion. And maybe it could cause more.” She moved around the table, and her men were hesitating but when she approached Cisco they were right on her heels.

“The point is, Mr. Ramon, I don't know which it is. All I know is that Barry Allen can do things that are physically impossible, and since his awakening more people have come along every day who can do impossible things. Things that me, my men, the police, the military, may not be able to fight against. And that is something I can't abide. If there is any chance that the technology to create these...metahumans, is it? If that technology exists, this is where it will be. And you are the ones who have made it.”

He opened his mouth to answer, but nothing came out. There was no way to conclusively argue the nonexistence of something, so fine. She wanted to have a look around, she could look around all she wanted. Maybe it was inevitable. If not her and her group, some other group who blamed STAR and Wells for the affects of the explosion would pull a Blackout and come calling.

Maybe it was time to just get it out of the way.

She nodded at his lack of response, like she had won an argument and was quietly pleased by it. “Now, let's get you down to your coworkers. Gentlemen.” She pitched her voice louder, and the men behind her grew that much more stiff and alert. “Mr. Ramon and I have reached an agreement. So let's just make a _minor_ example out of him. Try to put him in his cell conscious.”


	3. Chapter 3

“Come on, come on.” Barry had both hands against his ear, pushing the earpiece in as close as he could, trying to make sense of the distant noises after everything had gone quiet.

“Barry?” Wells had called over a few times: Barry couldn't stop himself from reacting in audible ways to what he heard over the mic. Particularly the appearance of Lyla's boss and her threat to make an example out of Cisco.

Barry grimaced and answered him finally, since he was getting nothing out of the random background sounds filtering through the mic. “Cisco got the mic com turned on. I was trying to hear what was going on.”

“Get anything?”

He frowned. “This is a bad group,” he answered, though that was something he already knew, not something the mic had told him. “Oliver works with them in Starling City, but I don't think it's that happy an alliance. They're...dangerous.”

“ARGUS,” Wells answered, and Barry shouldn't have been surprised but he was. “I was afraid of that.”

“What do you know about them?” Caitlin asked, distant on the other side of Wells.

“ARGUS has been in operation, in some form or another, since the 80s. They are a particularly underhanded, semi-legitimate government operation. Because they work to safeguard the country they are left alone to govern themselves as long as they remain undiscovered. But they are vicious in the mission.” Wells sounded grim. “Torture, murder, assassinations. Imprisonment without trial in places that makes Guantanamo look like Disney Land.”

Barry let out a breath, rethinking his opinion of Lyla Michaels one more time. He couldn't help but think of Oliver's words in Starling, about how much meaner the world was in Starling than in Central City. Maybe that was a warning about allies as well as enemies.

“Any idea what they want with us?” Wells asked after a heavy moment of silence had passed.

“Cooperation,” Barry answered with a frown. “Whatever that means. I don't think the woman in charge likes you much, Doc.”

“Mm.” Wells sounded mildly amused. “What's that saying about knowing how well you've lived your life based on the enemies you've made?”

Barry had no idea, but before he could answer the door into the pipeline swished open. He shoved his headpiece down off his head, though of course the woman already knew he'd been listening to everything.

No woman came through, though. Instead a couple of ARGUS soldiers came through, stone-faced and hauling something between them.

“Cisco!”

Caitlin's exclamation made Barry jump to the glass door of his cell to look closer.

Cisco's head was lolling, just a curtain of dark hair, but at the sound of Caitlin's voice he looked up. It looked like it hurt him.

Barry felt some of that hurt, looking at his split lip and the way he was limping even as the soldiers supported most of his weight between them. Barry had seen a lot of pain the last few months, but it didn't sit right on Cisco. It didn't sit right on anyone, of course, but Cisco was the last person he would have expected to see like that.

Cisco squinted out at their cells. He grinned, but it probably had the opposite affect than he intended. His skin was too pale, and his lip started trailing blood when he smiled.

The soldiers took him to Barry's other side, and Barry heard the door of the next unit over sliding open.

“Hey,” he called out. “He's hurt, at least put him with one of us so we can help him!” When there was no answer he pounded on the glass. “Hey!”

The soldiers passed him a few moments later, empty-handed. The glass beside his cell slid shut, and neither of the men so much as glanced his way as they left.

Barry glared at the closing door. He pounded the glass one more time, uselessly. But when he called out his voice was careful. “Cisco? Hey, talk to me.”

There was a pause. “It's cool, man.” Cisco's voice came through barely as loud as Caitlin's, though he was right beside Barry. “Survived worse in high school.”

“Yeah?” Barry relaxed a little.

“Ron Janssen,” he went on. “Dickhead. Tutored him in Chemistry, all wrong answers, he failed the term, got suspended from the football team. Now that was a beating.” The words were halting, especially for Cisco, and rough, but his humor was obviously still intact.

Barry smiled faintly. “That was dumb, trying to send a message to Felicity. I don't think we can count on anyone from Starling City showing up here.”

Another pause. “Hey, I'm an optimist.” Cisco groaned suddenly, but when he spoke again he was a little louder. Closer to the glass, maybe. “So...ow, crap, damn, hang on...”

“Cisco!” Caitlin shouted, coming through easily. “Any major injuries? Broken ribs, concussion?”

“No thanks, been a tough day already,” he answered, but it was just a murmur.

“He says no,” Barry called loud enough that she could hear. These cells were going to get really frustrating really fast.

“Do you know specifics about what these people want?” Wells called next.

Cisco answered quietly, leaving Barry to repeat his words to the other two. Cooperation, like Barry had overheard. Guarantees that STAR labs wasn't involved in the deliberate manufacture of metahumans and didn't have the technology to create more. And then something more specific, something Barry hadn't caught mention of through the mic earlier.

He repeated Cisco's words, brow furrowed: “There's an empty corridor on the west side of the sub-basement, directly over the pipeline, that doesn't lead to any rooms that are still active. But they're really interested in that corridor and the wall behind it, and they want our help figuring out what's there.”

This time the pause came from Wells. It went on long enough that Barry ended up pressed against the glass, listening, ready to repeat himself.

When Wells spoke again he sounded grim. “When they come back, I'll go with them. Cisco, rest. I've got it from here.”

Barry answered before Cisco could say anything. “What corridor are they talking about? What's there?”

A beat, then two, then “Nothing that these people will ever know about.”

“This woman, she's serious. She'll hurt you.” Cisco sounded as solemn as Barry had ever heard him, which was as worrying as seeing him with blood streaking down his face. “If we can just stall for a little while...”

But he didn't say any more, and Wells didn't feel the need to amend his statement.

Barry let out a breath, turning his back on the glass and sliding down to sit on the floor. If he could convince them to leave his team alone and take him out there instead, maybe he would be able to get away from them long enough to get everyone to safety.

But he couldn't. Saving his team meant putting Joe and Iris in ARGUS's sights, and that was something he couldn't do. He would never willingly put Cisco and Caitlin in danger, but the STAR Labs team had accepted some measure of danger into their lives just by working with Barry, dealing with the metas.

Joe had accepted it too, but Central City wouldn't stand the loss of Joe West. There would be a vacuum in the city, a black hole where a good man used to be, a better man than most people could measure up to. And Iris? Iris was completely innocent. There wasn't a world without Iris in it. Not one that Barry Allen would ever willingly live in.

He had never thought of himself as playing favorites or putting family above team or anything like that, but now that push had come to shove he knew without hesitation that he would do everything he could to protect his family. Even if it meant the team stayed at risk.

But surely he could find a way to do it that wouldn't get Cisco hurt any worse, or put Caitlin in danger, or let Dr. Wells roll his way into trouble just to protect lab secrets.

It was up to Barry. He knew that, he accepted it. Cisco never should have been put into danger, and Barry would have to deal with that guilt. But he wouldn't let it happen again.

 

* * *

 

Of course when the time came and Barry's noble thoughts were all shaped up and energizing him to do what he had to to step into danger...it didn't actually matter. The woman who led her soldiers in was a stranger to him, slim and beautiful and cold, and she didn't give Barry's cell a single glance.

She moved right to Cisco's, though she stayed back enough that Barry could still see her. “Well? Have you lived up to your end of our deal?”

Barry frowned. Deal?

Cisco answered fast, and the period of rest had done him good because he already sounded stronger. “Of course I did. I know all about your secret corridor, take me up and I'll let you in.”

“Cisco!” Wells answered before Barry could even realize how little sense that answer made. “That wasn't our decision. If they want access to STAR's secrets, I'm the one who can give them that access.”

The woman glanced down the corridor towards Wells, but she only looked mildly amused. “I'm impressed, he's feeling more cooperative than I expected.”

Cisco didn't miss a beat. “He's full of crap. Let's do this.”

But the woman hesitated. She moved down the corridor, passing Barry with a single long glance, and she stopped at the next cell over. “Are you full of crap, doctor?”

“My team has something of an overprotective nature towards me,” Wells answered calmly. “I blame the chair. But believe me when I tell you that my presence is required if you want to see what's inside any rooms on the west side of the sub-basement.”

Cisco laughed, a cough of sound that sounded nothing like his usual laughter. “And like I told you, there's no place in this building that I can't get into. I'm an engineer, and this building is my baby.”

“Cisco, that's enough! Listen to me. There are places here that have protocols in place. They will literally _self-destruct_ before they allow access to anyone who isn't me.”

“That sounds like some fairly advanced technology, Doctor Wells.” She smiled as if unbothered by the conversation, but her gaze never wavered. “And you will come with us quietly and allow us access to these places?”

“If that's what it takes to get you the hell out of my lab, then yes.”

“And that's where I stop believing you. We have a rather thorough file on you. You're much more likely to think you can get rid of us than try to work with us. Mister Ramon, what do you think?”

“I think there isn't a single room in this lab I can't get into. There's not many rooms anywhere I couldn't access.”

“Damn it, Cisco--”

“Sorry, Doctor Wells.” Cisco's casual confidence faded to something softer. “There's a hierarchy here, remember?”

“Those rules are about Barry, not about me.”

Barry frowned.

“I guess I see it differently. I'm not gonna let you lead these people into a trap just because you think you might get out of it alive.”

The woman smiled at that. “Now, that fits into what we know about you, Doctor Wells. You have a plan, do you?”

“He's always got a plan. Can we just do this? I might need some time with the tech if there is something complicated in place.”

There was silence for a moment. The woman looked hard at Wells through the glass of his cell.

“If you don't take me with you, someone is going to die.” Wells spoke flatly.

“Well then, isn't it good we have a volunteer.” She turned on her heel and headed back to Cisco, not looking at Barry as she passed. “Come on, Mister Ramon. I'd actually like to watch you work."

The glass swished open.

“You're making a mistake,” Wells called out, sudden and loud. “This is me being absolutely honest with you. This is a mistake.”

She didn't look back. She surveyed the cell beside Barry's, and smiled her approval after a moment. “I'm glad my men weren't too rough with you.”

“Oh, yeah, no, they were great.” Cisco appeared in Barry's line of sight in a few moments, limping slowly but moving on his own. “Also I totally knew you liked me.”

“You know, I almost do.”

“Cisco, listen to me. You don't understand what you're getting into.”

Cisco and the woman completely ignored Wells. She even took his arm and helped him up the ramp as they headed towards her waiting crowd of lackeys.

He didn't know whether to be amused or feel sick.

Once the entrance into the pipeline shut, he, Wells, and Caitlin were on their own again. Wells cursed under his breath, but for a long moment that was the only noise.

“What hierarchy were you guys talking about?” Barry asked, because the silence felt way too heavy. “What rules do you have about me?”

A pause, and then Caitlin, thankfully, asked the more important questions. “Are there really protocols here that we don't know about? How much danger is Cisco in?”

But Wells wouldn't answer either one of them. No matter how many times they asked.

 

* * *


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, it's been a busy couple of weeks. Work and moving apartments and all. But no one cares, let's get to the fic! 
> 
> Just an FYI, I did just repost the previous three chapters with some editing. Nothing huge, just some dissatisfaction with certain moments and conversations. That's what I get for posting unbetaed first and second drafts. So maybe you want to give those a reread, maybe not. Whatevs. 
> 
> Here's this, and I promise the next chapter will be up in days, not weeks.

The pipeline had been silent, tense, air thickening with every passing minute without Cisco's return or Wells condescending to answer any questions.

The explosion interrupted all that heavy quiet. It sounded like a thunderclap, long and rumbling and far away through the heavy walls of the pipeline.

“What was that?” Caitlin asked after the rumble died off.

Nobody answered. The silence got heavier, and Barry couldn't help but feel it like a tangible thing coming from Wells. He had to know, had to have some idea, but he wasn't talking. He was still not talking.

Barry resisted the urge to punch at the wall again.

He didn't know what was worse: the silence, the helplessness, the empty cell on his other side. Knowing that Wells was keeping things from them. Knowing that Cisco was out on his own.

But it turned out the worst was yet to come.

 

* * *

 

The next time the wide round door leading into the pipeline slid open, maybe an hour after that still-unidentified rumble of noise, a very familiar figure was on the other side of it. A tall, broad form clad in all green, wearing the same kind of synthetic polymer of Barry's own suit, complete with green hood and masked eyes.

“Oliver!” Barry shot to his feet and leaned against the door, hands pressed into the glass. “Jesus, am I glad to see you.”

Oliver didn't grin back. He looked grim. Which was normal for him, but given the circumstances that mood weighed heavier on Barry.

He peered at Barry, and the cells neighboring his, and frowned. “How do I get you out of there?”

Wells talked him through operating the control panel out in the corridor. Luckily Oliver was quick to understand the technology, and without losing much time Barry was finally free from that tiny, horrible cell. Caitlin and Wells were right behind him.

Barry streaked to Oliver's side, though part of him – a big part of him – wanted to keep going up and out and find Cisco and check on Joe and Iris and deal with ARGUS any way he possibly could. First he had to know that doing that wouldn't get anyone else hurt.

“What's going on up there? You got the ARGUS soldiers contained? Cisco's with them, we need to find him.” He was physically twitching with the need to race off, but he had to play this smart, he knew that.

Wells didn't lose any time, though. He steered his chair past them and towards the wide elevator that would take them up out of the accelerator.

Barry watched him, but hesitated before following. “They have people on Joe and Iris, I have to make sure--”

“Joe and Iris are safe. I checked on them before I came here.” Oliver grimaced. “I know how Amanda Waller operates.”

That was all Barry needed to hear to get moving. He followed Wells to the end of the corridor, and Oliver and Caitlin came with him quickly.

“So what's happening up there?” Caitlin asked as they moved.

“ARGUS is gone.” Oliver's answer was low, and there was something hesitant in the words. “They must have known we were coming. They were gone when we got here. ARGUS doesn't want a fight with me. To be honest I really didn't want a fight with them, either.”

“Didn't?” Caitlin asked quickly. “Wait, they're gone? What about Cisco?”

They boarded the elevator, which moved more slowly and less smoothly than Barry remembered.

Oliver turned to them when they were inside, his features set. He dug into one of the many pockets Cisco had designed into his new uniform, and pulled out a slim smart phone. “Amanda sent me this, when we were approaching the lab.”

Barry hesitated, but took the phone. The screen Oliver had stopped on was a simple text from a number that read as Unassigned.

_I am actually sorry about Mr. Ramon._

He stared at those words. Almost as fast as his brain registered the most obvious conclusion, it also came up with arguments against that conclusion. She was sorry about having Cisco beaten. She was sorry about dragging him around at gunpoint, maybe, or threatening him, or something. Anything, anything but the obvious.

He looked up at Oliver, who looked back at him, silent, with regret in his eyes.

Barry swallowed. He handed the phone to Wells. “Is Cisco...” He swallowed again, but his voice was still unsteady. “Where is he?”

Oliver frowned. “Diggle's searching, but there's a whole chunk of the building upstairs blown to hell, so...”

Caitlin's gasp of breath as Wells handed her the phone made Barry's composure rattle.

“...we may never find him,” Oliver finished grimly.

Caitlin reached over and gripped Barry's arm, hard. “Wait.”

“I'm sorry. We got here as fast as we could.”

“Wait. No.” She turned to Barry, as if he had some kind of broader knowledge about what happened. “No, come on. He's not dead.” Her eyes were pleading.

Barry wanted to agree so badly his throat burned with it, but he couldn't.

Wells cleared his throat. “If nothing's been found then nothing is known. We're not going to accept anything until we have proof.”

“Proof. Right.” Caitlin straightened, her jaw squaring, though her eyes were still too bright and too wide. “Explosions can't erase everything. There's always some kind of...of biological evi...” She trailed off, pushing the phone back at Oliver and covering her mouth with her hand.

Barry took her arm then. “We'll find him.”

The elevator finally opened, the trip feeling twice as long as usual. But that made sense when the first thing Barry noticed was the acridness of smoke in the air that told him how close the explosion was to the elevator systems.

The smell hit him before anything else did. Smoke; heavily chemicalized smoke. As potent as it was he was surprised there were only wisps of actual smoke in the air, and even those were dispersing fast. Fans, safety protocol. STAR had a thousand, no doubt.

The next thing that he consciously took in was the brown and black, the carbon-seared walls, the blown out chunk of the corridor that seemed to have spread from the outer wall further inside. In fact he could see the remnants of an old storage room through the holes in the wall.

The west side of the corridor, the wall without doors, was barely touched. This was specifically meant not to hurt anything in that section. However this was rigged to blow, it was designed to spray outward with very little kickback.

Wells' secrets were intact, and still safely hidden away.

Barry frowned at a blast of debris in a corner, approaching it with the forensic side of his brain kicking into gear. “There was a lot of force in this blast,” he said out loud, more to himself than anyone else. “Looks like it was highly directional, aimed at clearing out this whole corridor. Clean, too. I should be able to find some kind of...”

He frowned, looking over the wall at the smoking remains of whatever was stored in that next room over. There was a lot of char, a lot of debris. That was where most of his evidence was. There was more smoke in the room than out in the corridor, and it was hot enough in there that he didn't want to lean in for too long. At first glance he couldn't tell if any of the debris was...organic.

The thought made him straighten, made him kick out of work mode. He turned to face Wells. “What kind of device was it?”

“A complicated one,” Wells answered. His jaw was set, his gaze on the side of the corridor that seemed to be hiding whatever his secrets were. “And you're right, it is meant to incinerate. There will be very little evidence left, but there will be enough. If someone died here...”

“ _Someone_?” Barry took a long stride towards his chair before he stopped himself. His hands were fists at his sides. “What are you hiding back there? Was it worth it? If Cisco died to protect it...”

“I tried to die in his place,” Wells answered, a snap of that already-sharp voice that made Barry flinch. “I would have.”

Barry wasn't sure he believed that – not that Wells expected to die if he went instead of Cisco, at least - but he accepted it for the moment

He looked over at Caitlin, since it was safer for his temper to meet her eyes instead of looking at Wells. “We should wait for the temperature to die down a little before we go in looking closer, but I'll know soon.”

She nodded. Her eyes were wide, horrified, and Barry couldn't help but think that just looking at her would be a hell of a punishment for Wells, for whatever it was he was hiding so vehemently, even from his own team.

“He's my best friend,” she said, as if reading his mind. Her voice was thin. “I don't want to do this again, Barry.”

Barry swallowed. Short of Iris, Cisco was probably his best friend too these days. And all of this was way too surreal to deal with. He needed facts.

Oliver had been standing back, giving them space, but he came forward to stand at Barry's side. “Is this what Amanda was after? Whatever was here?”

“Among other things.” Barry had to resist the urge to glare at Wells again. He moved away from Oliver, since something about his presence was making Barry really tense. He studied the unmarred side of the corridor, wondering what the hell could possibly be hidden back there that would make all this worth it.

The wall was solid enough – he couldn't see any hints of a door. Did Wells keep his secrets walled in, some kind of Edgar Allen Poe thing that made him build the wall, the whole building, around a room full of toys he didn't want anyone else playing with?

If he had time, or a more rational mindset, he would have turned on Wells right then and there with the smoke still circulating out of the air around them. He would have searched every inch of the floors, the walls, until he cracked this stupid corridor of its secrets.

As he had that thought he looked around, and his gaze fell to the floor near the wall.

He stopped breathing. Just for a few seconds, just long enough that his next draw of air was more a ragged gasp.

On the floor, unmistakeable, seared into the tile with dark black carbon as a crayon, were two footprints. Someone had been standing there, right there, right against that unharmed fucking wall, when the explosion hit.

Someone had been...incinerated, Wells said. Meant to incinerate. Someone had been blown, burned, vaporized into dust, so hot and so fast that there was nothing left of them but the lighter spaces where their shoes had been.

Maybe those shoe outlines were too big to be Cisco's. Or maybe the blast searing outward just made them look wider and longer than they were. But the forensic side of his brain didn't click back on, refused to help him sort it out.

Barry stood there, his back to his friends, staring at the floor, until he had to look away. He didn't want Caitlin to see where he was looking. Not yet. Christ.

He turned around and found Oliver with his gaze, feeling clammy and tense and strange. “If Cisco really is...” He felt Caitlin watching him, and he couldn't say the words out loud. Not with those shoe prints behind him. “However this turns out, ARGUS came here meaning to overpower us. That woman threw us in cells, and had Cisco beaten. What are we going to do about that?”

Oliver glanced over at Caitlin and Wells, and left them behind as he moved up to meet Barry. “ARGUS is a hard opponent to have, Barry. I work with Amanda because, frankly, I don't have any choice. When she calls you, you come or you regret it, hard.”

Barry waited. “None of that answers my question.”

“I'm telling you...I'm giving you another lesson here, Barry, and it's an important one: sometimes you have to pick your battles.” Oliver was grim. “You against ARGUS...that's not a war you can win. If Amanda wants something from you...” He shook his head.

“What? We should give it to her?” Barry stared at him. “She might have just killed Cisco. She probably just killed _Cisco._ ” His voice was too loud, but he didn't care. There was no reason to hide his bullshit from Caitlin and Wells. 

He was furious at Wells, too much to grasp at the moment, but if that was really Oliver's advice then it was Oliver Queen against STAR, and Barry was very much with STAR. 

“I know, Barry.” Oliver spoke soothingly, or as soothingly as he was capable of. “And I promise you, I won't let that go.”

“ _You_ won't? To hell with you!”

At just the wrong moment, a door at the other end of the corridor slid open and John Diggle strode in, looking intent. He relaxed a little when he spotted the group at the other side, near the smoke and the chaos. But his shoulders were squared as he approached, his face set and as solemn as Oliver's.

“Digg.” Barry looked at him and saw another face, a woman's face. “You brought them here. Your _wife_.” 

Diggle's steps never slowed. He looked all the more grim, but it didn't seem to be aimed at Barry.

“Lyla is the reason we're here, Barry.” Oliver shifted, moving between Barry and Diggle and catching Barry's furious gaze. “She warned us before she and her soldiers left Starling City. This was going to happen with or without her. If she led it she could at least try to minimize the damage.”

“Oh, she did a great job.” Barry turned away from him, from Diggle, looking back at the charred hole in the sheer corridor wall. Two footprints on the ground that marked the end of someone's life. And Caitlin, watching him, devastated. “They only got one out of four of us.”

Her face fell, and she looked away fast.

Barry drew in a breath. He looked at Wells next, sitting ramrod straight in his chair, his face set and pale, eyes grim. He looked back at Barry and seemed, if anything, approving of his temper.

Something about that look settled Barry down a little bit. He tried to imagine that Joe was there, right behind Wells, watching him react, and that helped even more.

Anger is okay, Joe would have told him. Just make sure you do something with it. Make sure it's productive, or it's a waste. 

So fine. He was fired up, but instead of taking it out on the two men who had just come six hundred miles to help him, he needed to use it for Cisco. He needed proof of life.

He turned to Oliver and Diggle again and drew in a breath. “Look...thank you for coming. I'm sorry, I just...”

“Don't.” Diggle answered easily. “Oliver and I have both lost friends before. We understand.”

Barry wanted to protest that maybe they hadn't lost Cisco, but he couldn't. Despite his ordinarily optimistic nature, it already felt like they really had lost him. Like his last memory of Cisco Ramon would be his walking out of the pipeline with Amanda Waller, joking with the head of ARGUS that he totally knew she liked him. And her agreeing.

It wasn't a bad final memory, really. It fit Cisco, at least. 

Jesus.

Barry blinked, and wasn't surprised when his vision blurred and his eyes went hot. “The scene here has to cool down before I can...” He backed up, looking away from everyone. “I...I need to call Iris and Joe. I have to know they're okay.”

Oliver held out his phone, but Barry shook his head. He was on the edge of something that felt like it was tearing him in half, and he couldn't give in to it in front of them. Not Oliver and Digg, who were grim and strong and hard in all their losses. And not Wells, who Barry couldn't help but blame for all of this.

He called to the tingle that was always under his skin, and shot a glance at Caitlin. Her he would have shared his growing grief with, and for a moment he wanted to grab her and take her with him, away from these hard men and their secrets and their stoicism.

But she met his eyes for that quick moment, and she nodded. She understood. She always understood, even when he didn't.

He should have said something, maybe. To Caitlin. To Cisco. He should have said more. He should have known he spoke Spanish. He should have known she went to Caltech. Thoughtful Barry Allen, and look where it had gotten his friends.

He couldn't speak to Caitlin with those eyes on them, so he backed up, he let the electricity under his skin spark up, and he streaked away from all of them as fast as he could.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long. But at least I don't leave you in suspense. :)

Barry shot through the corridor away from all of them, up the stairwell, arriving in the control room in an instant.

He streaked through the room blindly, trying not to think of that very morning in that very room, of Cisco beaming at his phone, his mom, his Spanish and his candy and his plotting the ultimate bro night to cheer Barry up even though he'd already bro-nighted Barry through the worst of his depression about Iris.

His cell phone was in the suit room with his street clothes. Barry changed fast out of his suit, resetting it on its display so that it was perfect, the way Cisco always demanded.

He sagged against the table, clutching his phone. The screen told him it was a little after three PM. Seven hours. That was it. Seven hours sitting uselessly in a cell and letting his friend step in the way of ARGUS and their guns and their search.

He had six missed calls, all from Joe. No doubt they started when he didn't show up for work on time.

Barry's hand was shaking when he started to push the button to call him back.

But the phone dropped to his side, number undialed. He leaned back against the table, breathing raggedly. This was too much. ARGUS, Lyla and Amanda, Cisco. Wells and his secrets, Joe and Iris so easily threatened.

Cisco.

It just couldn’t be right. It couldn’t happen that way. Cisco was...he had been the first person Barry saw after his coma. The first smile, the first introduction. And ever since that first moment Cisco had been the one person in his life who had absolute unflagging faith in Barry’s ability to do anything. No matter how out-there, Cisco always said yeah, sure, of course you’re up for that.

Barry had lots of support growing up, of course. Joe and Iris always believed in him. But once he put that suit on and started speeding around, everyone had doubted him in some way or another. Everyone but Cisco.

He hadn’t appreciated that. He hadn’t even consciously realized it until now, until he looked around that suit room and saw every grin and thumbs-up Cisco ever shot him, every victory high five, every suit adjustment Cisco joyfully explained to him. Every bad guy they’d ever run across, every moment of hesitation from Caitlin and Wells that was countered by Cisco’s enthusiastic ‘you can do this!’

If Barry had one flaw - and he had plenty - it was that he needed people to have faith in him before he could have faith in himself. It was strange. After more than a decade of fighting the rest of the world about his mother’s murder and his dad’s innocence, he would have thought he’d be used to going his own way and ignoring what anyone else said. Instead the reverse seemed to be true: he could fight for his dad’s innocence, but that left him no courage to deny the world anything else it insisted was true.

When Joe doubted him, when Wells doubted him, then he doubted himself and he failed. But Cisco. Even when everyone else said no, Cisco said yes without hesitation. Cisco had always been the support Barry constantly looked around for.

How the hell could he take that for granted? _Damn_ it. He had never had to do all this without Cisco. He wasn't sure he was up to it.

He took a few moments, hand over his eyes, trying not to give in entirely to the shudders that were threatening to rattle his composure.

“B-ba...barry?”

He jumped at the voice, ragged and hitched and oh my god _familiar._ He looked around to the doorway from the control room.

Cisco?

Just...standing there. Cisco, just like that, alive and there and leaning against the doorway.

“Oh...” The phone fell from his hand. He was at Cisco's side before it could hit the ground. “Oh my god! Cisco, oh, man, oh man, you have no idea...” His hands found Cisco's shoulders and he studied him intently, wide-eyed and slack-jawed from sheer relief.

He looked exactly the same as when he walked out of the pipeline. His clothes were undisturbed, his face bruised and swollen but nothing deadly. He looked fine _._ He looked _perfect_.

But he was shuddering, hard. Almost twitching, like he'd been shocked badly and the residual spasms were still hitting him hard. Under Barry's hands he felt unsteady, and now that Barry was looking closely he looked pale. Gray.

“I d-don't...know. Know what...h-happened. S-something's...” Cisco paused as his shudders seemed to grow especially intense. “Something's wrong,” he got out, with difficulty.

But Barry couldn't stop from grinning. “Okay. Oh, Jesus. Um, okay, come on, sit down, I'll call Caitlin. Man, I thought you were _dead_. We thought...”

Barry hefted Cisco's weight enough to speed him over to the bed that was usually his to lie in. He sat Cisco down on the edge of the cot, beaming, before crouching to grab the phone he'd dropped.

He straightened up fast and reached out for Cisco again instantly, supporting him enough that he could stay upright. His unstoppable grin faded then, when he felt the constant shudders making Cisco twitch so hard, and he saw the fear in Cisco's eyes. He wrapped his arm around Cisco's waist to support him, bringing his phone up and dialing Oliver, since he wasn't sure where ARGUS had put Caitlin's phone.

“Barry?”

“Oliver. He's here.” Despite the shivering against his side Barry's smile returned when he spoke those words. “I need Caitlin to the control room, Cisco's alive, he's up here.”

“Oh, thank god.” Oliver hung up fast.

Barry dropped his phone back on the bed behind him and faced Cisco. “Okay, she's coming. She'll know what's wrong. God, Cisco, man, you have no idea...”

Cisco tried to smile, but his body jerked and the expression stuttered away fast. God, he was shaking all over, twitching, constant motion. Like he'd been left in a freezer, though he didn't feel cold.

Barry frowned, studying him, looking for injuries beyond the shaking. “There was an explosion in the sub-basement. We thought you were down there.”

“I was,” Cisco got out between tremors. “When it...blew. S-some...something... _happened_.” 

“We'll figure it out,” Barry said, though he was getting a little more apprehensive just watching him. Those shakes were way too intense to just be shivers, but not wild enough to be full seizures. He might have guessed it was shock, but Cisco showed none of the other signs. His eyes were scared, but clear and focused. His speech stuttered but didn't slur.

“What happened?” Barry asked, trying to diagnose his condition and eliminating answers as quickly as they came to him. Not shock, not seizure. Not cold, not electrical shock. Presumably not rapid onset of any sort of condition that caused tremors.

Cisco shook his head. He held a hand up in front of him, watching it shake uncontrollably. “Boom.”

Barry wanted to laugh, or cry, or something ragged and uncontrolled. Instead he forced a smile. “Yeah, we heard that part.”

“N-no. Boom. Tube.”

Barry frowned. “Boom tube?”

Cisco smiled, but even that had the muscles of his face twitching and he gave up fast. “N-not my best n...name.”

“Cisco?” The doors back in the control room slid open and Caitlin's heels clattered fast on the floor. “Cisco?”

“In here! He needs help.” Barry

She was there in an instant, flinging herself through the doorway, her face a pink mixture of glee and worry. “Oh, thank you, thank you thank you.” She reached the bed and threw her arms around Cisco, all but pushing Barry away from him.

It was a pretty rare display of emotions for Caitlin, and she drew back fast. Though from the look on her face she pulled away more out of concern than anything else. Her hands stayed on his shoulders as she studied him, and Barry could practically see the no-doubt-more-accurate diagnoses flashing through her brain.

“Okay, lay back. Barry?”

Barry helped Cisco scoot up on the bed and drop back on the thin mattress. He looked back when movement caught his eye, and spotted Oliver and Diggle making their way in. It looked like Wells had been left behind in the rush.

He was okay with that, for the moment.

He tried to smile at them, but concern was starting to overpower his relief. He turned back to Caitlin. “What can I do?”

“You know the drill. Pretend he's you and this is another checkup. Let's hook him up, get vitals. Cisco, lose the shirt.”

Cisco huffed a breath, sounding amusingly like Barry when she was ordering him around during his checkups. Barry helped him sit up. Cisco reached for the hem of his shirt, but the way he was shaking he couldn't even get his fingers to close around the thin fabric.

Barry swallowed, watching him struggle, getting more and more scared of this thing he couldn't think of any reason for. “Let me help.”

Cisco nodded, a jerky movement. He lifted his arms as Barry pulled off the t-shirt and the long-sleeved jersey he wore under it. Typical Cisco lab uniform.

“Sorry the view's n-not...not as good as n-nor..n-n- _nor_ mal,” he said as he laid back. The humor in his eyes died as the words got scrambled up so badly.

Caitlin snorted, though her expression was openly worried. “Right now you're the sexiest thing I've ever seen, okay? No competition.”

“Hey.” Cisco looked over at Barry with the faintest quirk in his mouth. “Kn-new abs were overrated.”

“Well, but mine were magically bestowed on me by lightning. That's worth a few more points, right?”

They both looked at Caitlin.

She heaved a breath, but a smile broke out, wide and lit from deep inside. “Even now, still children.”

Barry grinned, but got to work putting the monitor sensors in place on Cisco's chest. Skin against skin he could feel how deep those constant shudders went. He drew back as Caitlin pulled up the sensor readings on the display behind her.

His eyes drifted to her now and then but mostly stayed on Cisco.

No abs, maybe, but his skin was this all-over rich shade of brown, and he had Barry beat in the chest hair department, and he was _alive_ and--

\--and looking right at Barry, giving a shiver of a grin. “Y-you just totally ch-check...checked me out.”

Barry just shrugged, though his face heated up.

Cisco's eyes went behind him and caught on their other visitors. Wells had joined the Starling City duo by then, and was smiling in what looked like genuine relief to see Cisco alive and talking.

“H-hey!” Cisco waved at them, but his greeting smile vanished fast. “Lyla might b-be in tr-trou...ble, w-with Amanda. Might n-need help.”

Diggle tensed noticeably, but he didn't move. “She can handle herself. How you doing, little man?”

Cisco beamed at him through his shudders. “Y-you told her I'm funny. You think I'm funny.”

Digg humphed out a breath. “A little, maybe, but they say looks aren't everything.”

Cisco nearly sat up at that, mouth open in a shocked grin. “A j-joke! That was a...” His words cut off as a series of hard, forceful shakes came over him and set him back against the bed, grimacing. “Fuck.”

Wells moved his chair up between Oliver and Diggle. He approached the bed, frowning from Cisco to the diagnostics on the walls that Caitlin was studying so intently. “What happened, Cisco?”

Cisco lay back, gritting his teeth through the shakes. He shook his head silently.

Barry spoke up after a moment, reaching out and laying a hand on Cisco's arm. “Whatever it was, he called it Boom Tube.”

Wells had a visible reaction to that. His eyes jerked over to Cisco, his mouth working, before he forced himself to look back at the displays. “Interesting.”

Barry caught that reaction with some surprise. He'd repeated that name as a joke, but it sure hadn't been taken that way. He studied Wells, wondering. Maybe he was just disposed to distrust him now in a way he never had before. He had almost killed Cisco, after all, him and his secrets.

“His heart rate is fast, though I think we can blame the excitement for that. But look at this.” Caitlin pointed Wells to a monitor, a full body display of muscle and skeleton that was lit up bright red all over. “His muscle activity is off the charts.”

“Mm.” Wells wheeled in closer, intent.

“I've seen seizures, and this is something different. It's...” She frowned back at the bed, at Cisco and Barry each in turn. “It's affecting every muscle group at once.”

“What could cause something like that?”

She hesitated, visibly groping for ideas. “Maybe some kind of...sonic...shock?”

“W-will it--” Cisco cut off with a hiss of breath. Frustration was starting to darken his eyes.

“Go away on its own?” she guessed. He shrugged. “I can't say unless I know what's causing it. I want to say it has to, simply because the muscles will exhaust themselves after not very long. But that's dependent on...” She frowned, regarding Cisco. “No, it will. It has to.”

“One way or another.” Wells steered his chair right up to the bed, reaching out and laying a hand on Cisco's arm.

Barry tensed from Cisco's other side.

But despite the grim words Wells looked genuinely relieved. He studied Cisco carefully, and his fingers drifted up his arm a little, probably getting the same feel for those deep shivers that Barry had. “Never again. You hear me?”

Cisco smiled faintly, an unsteady grimace of a look. “L-like I said...”

“No. Not like you said. Watch out for Barry all you want, step between Caitlin and a gun and I'll applaud you every time. But when I'm ready to step up and take my share, you don't interfere. That was never part of...” He trailed off, his gaze drifting to Barry briefly.

Barry opened his mouth to ask, again, what sort of arrangement they had made in Barry's name that he didn't know about. But Wells shook his head, hardly noticeable, and Barry let it go. It wasn't exactly a good time for it anyway.

He wasn't going to forget about it, though.

He did ask, because he couldn't stop himself, “What would have happened if you'd gone instead?”

Wells met his eyes, then surprised Barry by actually answering. “The same thing, only ARGUS would have been filling that corridor, and I would have been somewhere safe.”

“You would have killed them?”

Wells' eyebrows lofted. “To protect my team and my lab? Without a single regret.”

“Oh, you might have regretted it.” Oliver moved in, his eyes grim on the back of Wells' head as he approached the bed. “This isn't like some pack of unorganized metahumans. Take out ARGUS soldiers and you're only bringing more ARGUS soldiers down on you.”

“And I would handle them, too.” Wells looked away from Barry, shifting his chair to watch Oliver's approach. “I'm not stupid, Mr. Queen. I know how the world works, and I've heard quite a few stories about ARGUS. I appreciate the hydra that is born from taking action against people like this, and I am prepared.”

“Are they?” Oliver nodded towards the bed, to Cisco and Caitlin and Barry. “Are their friends and family? Do you plan to invite everyone they care about to live out their lives in the relative safety of STAR Labs? A place that, you'll remember, was just invaded today? Are their careers over, is Barry's time as The Flash done? You may have nothing to lose but your lab, but what about them?”

Wells frowned.

Oliver spoke intently. “You may not realize it right now, but you're actually in a good position. ARGUS left on their own, and by some miracle Amanda Waller seems to feel some kind of regret about what she thinks happened.”

Cisco smiled at that. It stuttered and vanished fast, though.

“If you're lucky whatever she saw here plus that regret might be enough to make her write you off her list entirely. That's as close to an ideal solution as you're ever going to get where she's involved.” He peered down at Wells, grim. “If you're unlucky, you'll end up dodging land mines on Lian Yu, no one will ever know that Caitlin Snow or Cisco Ramon existed. And Barry will live out his days a lab rat as ARGUS works to either understand him, produce more of him, or make him use his speed for their gain.”

Wells' mouth was pressed thin, his shoulders tense, but he didn't argue. After a moment he simply looked away from Oliver and back to Cisco.

Oliver frowned. Barry could see the distrust in his eyes as he talked to Wells, and he made a note to talk to Oliver about it later.

Oliver met Barry's eyes. “I'm telling you to be patient. Don't let it go, but don't go firing wildly in hopes that you hurt them more than they hurt you.”

Barry nodded. He understood, anyway. He wasn't sure he would listen, but he wasn't sure of much of anything right then.

With Cisco alive, though, it felt less vital to press the issue.

“Good.” Oliver let out a breath. “Trust me, Barry, ARGUS isn't the kind of group you target unless you're ready for an endgame right from the start.”


End file.
